http://www.tscholars.com/

Hey! Everybody... My friend and I started this website about six months ago, and just got done it. We really need a lot of suggestions and comments. What are your first impressions of this site? How can we change this website so that it will be better or more useful to our visitors? Any spelling/ grammatic errors? Please be honest... and hard...Thx ahead.

Logic - the layout it terms of logic is great personality, I love how you have all the articles show in the middle of the design and have the print and email icons. great.

Functionality - the functions of the website are ok. The links about tscholars and terms of service were hidden somewhere in the middle of the right column. This is ok, but should be more prominent. Maybe on the welcome page, have some links to it in bold in the content section.

Easy-to-navigate? - the navigation layout is pretty self explanitory. All the main links are up top while, other post-related links are on the right column. This is native to most people, and most people won't have problems getting use to navigating your site.

Graphics - the big graphic up top is a good size for download time, keeping image sizes down is important so people don't loose patience. The quality of the images aren't as good as they could be though. I can give you some tips if you just keep an open mind.

Two Designing image tips:
1) ease off the drop shadow. Not every word or letter in an image needs to have a drop shadow. In fact, from personal experience, words look better with little or no drop shadow at all.
2) word effects. keep the word effect filters done to a minimum. Lots of effects, like the ones you have on the tScholars.com and the word Welcome! just make it look too busy. Again, ease up, and I think you'll see it will look more professional.

The actual art of the main image looks pretty good, I like the concept; however the cursive letters, or whatever that is, is kinda confusing. If that was your goal, ok; but the repeating i's just boggle my mind.


Content Styling - for the most part, I love the way you have the content layed out. It's very easy to follow the flow and logic. My only dislike is the effects you have over your links. It really frustrates me when I highlight a link and the text size shrinks. I think you should keep the text size the same when you highlight it. Don't force text effects.

Conclusion - your site is better than most I've seen. You have the layout setup for easy access to dynamic content via forums and your own posts. This is really important in the website world. Dynamic is always better than static. Great job so far, and I hope you take some of my advice.

If you'd like, critique mine: A few of my websites

Good Solid Layout, which is easy to look round. Clear and quire easy to read.

Content is ok, i have to say that i didnt read much of it as it isnt a topic that interests me that much.

Easy to navigate around, good and well structured.

As for the graphics, i foudn you main graphic too over powering on my little eyes. The more i looked at it, the less it inspired my eyes. I started to find the menus hard to find, felt the graphic was a little too big in area terms.

I too say drop the shadows. :P

My Critique:

I'm sorry, but I'm going to be very critical about your website. I understand that you spent alot of time on it, but I do have good and bad views on it.

The first thing that comes at me is your main welcome image. I'm sorry, but I just do not find it interesting. In fact, I find it very distracting to the rest of your information, simply because of the size and hectic nature of the image. Personally, I would tone it down a bit.

The next thing I noticed that really seemed a problem was your links at the top. It seems you are loading your links via a template which loads it's content from a database. This is understandable due to the automation I'm assuming you want, however, you will have MAJOR problems with SEO (search engine optimization). Google HATES indexing sizes that use excessive query's. IT doesn't understand ? in a URL very well. Cant' handle them. Therefore, of all your content on the site, your forum and register page may be the only ones that get registered. That will hurt you in the long run.

Some good notes:
The layout of the index page is great. I love it. I love thf ont, the spacing and the text associated wiuth posts, not to mention the ability to print or email any article to someone. I have a similar option with my website, however not nearly as nicely organized. I may take an idea or two from your site ( ). I believe on the right, where you have recent posts and community stats is very good, however, just a little disorganized and distracting to the eye.

So overall, I think the site is alright, however your SEO tactics and image placing are the only things that really offset me.

These are just my opinions. Let me know if I can help with anything.

Oliver

I only critique sites when it is very very bad, but can easily be much better. This is the case with yours it is quite bad. Here is a list you should change

1. That entire color crazy banner on the top needs to be removed ASAP. It is so distracted and so purposeless to your site. It takes up 1/4 of the height in my VERY high resolution, I can only imagine how nightmarish it is in a regular resolution

2. Your top bar with the menu and the thin red bar under the words tscholars.com should have a 8 pixel white row under it. Then what should follow is the red part below the banner where it says ">home".... in otherwords take the whole banner out and replace it with a small white spacer

3. remove all shadows from your text - they look horrible as do most shadows, and make the text unreadable

4. Look at your paragraphs in the main portion of the text. They text on the right smashed righ tinto the sidebar grey area. You have to use a 10 to 15 pixel width spacer there, or a cellpadding

5. Your text in the grey sidebar areas also needs a spacer or cellpadding - it is jamming right into the edge of the sidebar whch is a bad thing

6. the text in your footer needs to be slid down slightly, it does not align with the footer red background at all

7. everytime i highlight your links in the footer the entire footer shape (the red) area expands and screws up the entire thing. you should NEVER use text that gains any size when hovered over. THis is like a 101 of horrible design

If you do these 7 things your site will go from lame to just fine.

thx a lot... I'll go ahead and fix them after the finals.. this week... Any other suggestions or comments?

you have a javascript above your doctype, this could throw some browsers into quirks mode, i would shift the script into the head (think that should be alright, although i don't really use scripting)

i agree with the others about the banner at the top, the site would look so much slicker without it.

one thing that really narks me if using images to replace text, and i think your "top three reasons to register" classifies as this.

i'm getting some really funky text size changing when i hover over the links in the uppermost menu (firefox 1.0)



I don't know if this was intentional, but if it was, then it looks very strange.

I'm getting something similar at the footer too, but this is causing it to flicker up and down.

em... oh yes... drop tables for divs with css, you'll live longer!

Hope i've been constructive